by Josh Weil
Now, outside the hospital, in the perpetual sidewalk crush, all he could do was try to help his stitched-up brother make it through the harried crowd. “Excuse me,” Yarik said, over and over, “I’m sorry,” and, pushing aside those who paused to peer at their faces, “please.”
When they got to his car, Dima stopped. In the light from the zerkala the sky blue of the Mercedes looked almost gray. “When did you get it?” his brother asked.
But Yarik was already walking around the other side, opening the door, sliding, for a second, out of sight. Stuffing the rucksack in the passenger footwell, he glanced up at the window: Dima’s bloodstained coat, the face hidden by the car’s roof, the stab of shame that Yarik felt at being glad for that. He leaned the rest of the way across the seat, lifted the lock.
When the engine rumbled alive on the first crank of the key his brother raised his eyebrows, as if impressed. But Yarik caught his wince; even that small movement must have hurt. And when Dima reached to his forehead, as if unsure what his fingers would find, Yarik reached over, too, flipped the visor down. The small dim mirror shook. Watching Dima see his own face in it, Yarik made himself look, too: a split in one eyebrow taped together, the forehead purpled close to the skin, blood crusted at his temple, in his beard, a patch, mustache to jaw, shorn clear for the gauze. Which was what the doctor had told him: eleven stitches in the chin, a few more in his torn lip, five above the left eye. His brother’s nose would just from now on be a flattened nose.
“I didn’t mean for them to hurt you,” Yarik said and began backing out. “When Timosha’s principal called Zina, and Zina didn’t know where he was, she called the police. Told them Timosha was missing. I knew it was you.”
“You knew?”
“I called them. Told the dispatcher I thought Timofei was with you. But when I called again she said someone else had called in a sighting. At least she told me you were on the lake.” And, yes, he knew. He knew that when he’d told her it must be Dima she hadn’t just called the police. Or the ones in the squad car had made a call of their own. How could he have believed that anything with which he’d threatened Bazarov would keep his brother safe? They would simply bring Slava down in the same way, tie him to some disgrace, drop him from their campaign. And once he had been replaced? “Dima . . .” he said, and told himself he’d tell his brother all of it now, everything, he had to, and the car hit a stretch of potholes and he peered out the windshield as if he could see them before they were already under the wheels, and told himself tell him, but when the road smoothed out again, he only said, “I got there as fast as I could.”
“How did you know?” Dima asked. “When you first heard Timofei was missing. How did you know it was me?”
Yarik pulled close behind the car in front of them, pushed the heel of his hand against the horn. When he let go, let the blare blow away again, Dima’s question only seemed to sit louder in the quiet. He looked at his brother. “The way we always do,” he said. Then he shifted, gunned the engine, pulled around the car into the oncoming lane. The rucksack slid against Dima’s shins, and Yarik glanced at it, at his brother, back at the road. “Timofei gave me your letter,” he said. He could feel Dima watching him. He kept his eyes ahead. “I’ll take Mama.” There was the whir of the tires on the frozen asphalt. “How is she?”
“OK,” Dima said. “Confused.”
“Is she eating enough?”
“No.”
“Are you?”
But Dima was staring ahead, as if at the blinking yellow signal of a trolley coming towards them on the tracks between the lanes. “Yarik,” he said, “what’s going on?” On the avenue a stoplight turned: a spot of red, the brake lights of cars. “Where did you go that night Zinaida was so worried?”
Yarik brought the car to a stop. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“She came to the apartment. Bought me coffee. She said you’d left early that morning.”
“What morning don’t I—”
“She said you’d taken Dyadya Avya’s gun.” Across the intersection, the tram was waiting, too, its signal flashing. “That was the night you left me that note,” Dima said. “Why? What was going on?”
The light changed; Yarik pulled right, caught his brother looking at the turn signal ticking in the dash, then back at the road they’d left behind, heard Dima blow a small laugh from his nose. “When you said get me home, too, I thought you meant . . .” The rest was lost in his brother’s throat.
“Dima”—Yarik’s own voice softened—“who would take care of Mama tonight?”
“We could take her together to your home.”
“No.” The word came out harder than he’d meant it. “We couldn’t.”
“I thought you said once you had the job, once things were settled—”
“What’s settled?”
“You said you’d get a car.”
“I got it three months ago, Dima.”
“You said you’d tell them to fuck off.”
“Don’t you think,” Yarik said, “that if it changed anything, any fucking thing, it would have changed it three months ago? Do you have any idea what I risked when I stopped those cops? What a risk I’m taking now? Waiting for you in the hospital? Driving you to your apartment? Dropping you off?”
“You took the risk all the time,” Dima said. “In the mornings, when you threw rocks at my window.”
“Gravel.”
“When you sat down there in this car.”
“A few pebbles.”
“Why?”
“You were sleeping late.”
“So?”
“I had to get to work.”
“Then—”
“I had to get to work and I didn’t want to go without hearing the rooster, all right?”
“I don’t understand.”
“There’s nothing to understand! I wanted to hear your rooster. You’re my brother and I wanted to hear your fucking rooster, one fucking rooster, crow in the fucking morning again.”
They sat in the sound of the snow and ice beneath the wheels, the rattling of the car over the cracked road, the ceaseless shush of the heat breathing out of the dash.
“He crows every morning,” Dima finally said. “You could just come and hear him. It doesn’t have to be so complicated. Why does it have to be—”
They braked, jerked forward, sat in the middle of the road. In the rearview mirror: the fog lights of cars coming close fast.
“You want to know why?” Yarik said. “I’ll show you.”
And he turned, sharp, onto a side street, and sharp again onto another avenue, driving too fast, out towards the city’s edge, until they were rushing past the shops cropping up before the bigger outlying stores, and he didn’t slow until he hit the strip where they sold electronics, the wide windows displaying sound systems and washing machines and computers and TVs, and they stopped.
A wall of televisions turned to the street, stacked tight as tiles. The Mercedes idled before them. Peering past his brother, Yarik stared through the the plate glass, scanning the bank of TVs, searching all those boxes of color and light.
“I don’t know why I thought it would still be playing,” he said. And, when Dima asked him what, “You. On the news. The old clips, you on the roof, the stuff of you skating on the Oranzheria.”
“Again?”
“And what someone shot tonight. You, all bloody.”
“Why—”
“Timosha, with his bloody face. Me dragging you off the ice. ‘Bringing you to justice,’ the reporter said. The police . . . You don’t want to know what the police said.” Behind Dima, the jittery images shook the screens.
“Why would they have said anything?”
“Because they were told to,” Yarik said. “They were paid to. You’re right, Dima, it’s not that complicated. But it is hard.”
With all the garish TV screens backlighting his head, his brother’s face seemed almost too dim to see. But Yarik knew his own was lit, that
Dima must be watching all the changing colors on his face. He tried to keep his jaw still, his mouth steady. But he knew that Dima felt it. Knew it from the softness in Dima’s voice when he said, “It didn’t used to be. It doesn’t have to be.”
Behind his brother the televisions seemed to shake. “But it is,” Yarik said, and in the wavering of his own voice knew that the shaking wasn’t the TVs.
“Who says so?” Dima asked, barely whispering. “Who paid them? Bratan? Who’s doing this to you?” Reaching across the shift, he touched Yarik’s leg so lightly his fingers hardly released their weight.
But Yarik jerked his leg away. He sat there, feeling Dima’s gaze on him, gazing past through the glass at the TVs. Some of them were on ads. One, he knew, would be the Consortium’s. There it was, the last few seconds: him in a suit and tie stepping out of his office, down from the trailer into a hard-hat crew, slapping their backs, returning their smiles as he got into a sedan—new, black; it had been one of Bazarov’s—and the camera closed in on one of the laborers watching. It was him, looking as he had a year ago. The old him lifted a hand and the camera cut again to the man in the suit, sliding into the leather interior, lifting a hand back, as if to say so long. But before the car drove off, before the camera showed the crowd of working men again, before the one word caption he knew would come, Yarik told Dima: “Him.”
Dima turned then, as if to try to see what his brother was looking at, on which TV, but by then Yarik had stopped watching the screen. He was staring, instead, at the wide window hazed over with mirror-light, and in it, their own reflections, their two ghostly faces peering back.
At first, he hadn’t believed her—this stairwell woman claiming to have been his brother’s lover—and then he didn’t want to: the way she’d told him how Dima had stopped her straying hands by speaking of his love for Yarik. Why do you think, she’d said, he chose that poem? And how had he never seen it till then: two souls joined only to be torn apart, one taken captive by a wizard, within a strange world’s walls, the other seeking nothing but to bring his lost half back. Though in the end it was his very need to not believe—in the idea of her with Dima, of Dima wanting to be with anyone but him—that had trapped him with the truth: the bond between them that had so skewed his twin still lay buried inside him, too. If he had made a different choice, chosen the same as Dima, allowed them to live out their lives alone with each other, simply two brothers together, he might have been as happy, just in a different way. A way that might—he shut his eyes to it, shook his head, shoved down the gas, turned back—have been a better life.
The rest of the way they drove in silence, as if each was waiting for something to happen before they reached their mother’s apartment block. Then they were there. Yarik pulled to the side of the street. He let the motor idle. He knew that if he looked at Dima he wouldn’t be able to tell him to go.
“Did you read it?” Dima said.
“Your letter?”
“The book.”
“Why?”
“I gave Timofei—”
“Why did you give me that?”
“I thought maybe you’d remember . . .”
“I remember,” Yarik said. “But I’m not Mama. The situation . . .” He reached down and pulled up the parking break and sat back against his seat, sat there with both hands on the steering wheel. “It’s different, Dima. Then it was about Mama. This was never about me, or you. It was always the situation. And the situation hasn’t changed.”
“So change it.”
“What did you think? That I would read a storybook we made when we were kids and give up my job and sell my apartment and move with you out to Dyadya Avya’s and bring Zinaida and Polina and Timofei and Mama out there and . . .”
“Yes.”
“And what? We would all farm?”
“Yes,” Dima said. “That’s what I thought.”
“We won’t.” It was as if by saying the words he’d broken something open inside him, loosed an occlusion in his veins, released his blood, and his grip eased on the steering wheel, his head lay back against the seat, and he said it again: “We won’t.”
“Maybe not now,” Dima said. “But someday . . .”
And Yarik could see he’d broken something in Dima, too. “Bratishka,” he said, he could only hope that whatever had become ruined inside his brother would wash away with it, “when was the last time you were out at Dyadya Avya’s?”
“You told me not to go.”
Go, Yarik thought. Go and see it and bleed it all out.
“Maybe now,” Dima said, “now that you have a car. Maybe we can go together for a day—”
“No,” Yarik told him. “Not for a day. Not ever.” He reached to his brother then, just wanting to touch him, somewhere, as if his fingers might find the break, stanch the flow, for a moment. “Bratishka,” he said, “can’t you see that we were never really going to?”
But before his fingertips could brush Dima’s face, Dima’s fingers had clamped around his, squeezing them tight in a fist.
They sat there, the two of them in the idling car, and someone driving by, glancing through the window, might have thought they were holding hands. A first few flakes of snow landed on the windshield.
“You’re wrong,” Dima said. “You’re wrong about that, just like you’re wrong about the situation. It is about us.”
“No,” Yarik said. “No, Dima, it’s the situation I’m in. It’s my situation. And it isn’t going to change.”
It was a wet snow, and the flakes became wet blurs on the windshield, and where enough had landed some had begun to stick.
“You know it has to,” Dima said. “It has to, Yarik. Because when I open the door and go upstairs and you disappear again, it will have changed. A little more. A little worse. And you will have been the one to change it.” He stopped, and Yarik could see him wait for the ache in his jaw and chin to begin to subside, and then, as if Dima meant to shoot it through his face again, he said, “You always could change it. Just like you always could have chosen to save the money, to go to Dyadya Avya’s with me.”
“Please,” Yarik said.
“You could have chosen me.”
Yarik reached up with his free hand then, and cupped it around Dima’s, and pulled until he had pried open his brother’s fist. He drew his bruised fingers to him. “Please,” he said. “Take your rucksack and open the door . . .”
“But the situation,” Dima said, “it did. Because you’re wrong about that, too, Yarik. It’s our situation. It’s the situation we’re in. It has become us.” He opened the door and stood up out of the car into the snow. He held the door by its cold edge. He began to close it.
“Wait.” Yarik sat holding his fingers in his hand as if they hurt, but there was no anger in him, not even any strength, just the same stripped-down sorrow he had felt when he’d first seen Dima come out into the waiting room. Except this time he made himself look Dima in the face. “Take the rucksack,” he told him.
Dima glanced down at it. The fabric around the zipper at the top was stained with blood, sagged into a hollow. He didn’t touch it.
There was the sound of the engine idling, the faint smell of the exhaust, the snow beginning to cling to Dima’s hair, his bandages, a few flakes drifting into the car. “Take the rucksack, Dima,” Yarik said, again. He shut his eyes. “Please, take it and go.”
“Look at me,” Dima told him.
But Yarik only squeezed his eyes more tightly shut. “Go,” he said. “Go far away. You’re not safe here. You’re not safe anywhere in Petroplavilsk. Or anywhere near the Oranzheria. Or near me.” Behind his shut lids his eyes were shaking. “Bratishka,” he said, “take the rucksack and go far away from me.”
He heard his brother reach down, take hold of a strap, lift the bag out of the car. At the sound, Yarik opened his eyes. He reached for the door handle. Dima held on to its edge. His brother stood there with it open and the snow falling all around him and said, “No. I won’t.
I won’t because I know how you knew it was me when you heard the police were looking. I know because, no matter what you tell me, or won’t, I knew you were in trouble that night you took the gun. And even if I can’t see you, even if I can’t talk to you, I won’t live somewhere so far away that I can’t even feel you anymore.”
For a moment, Yarik sat leaning across the empty seat, towards Dima holding the open door, the snow swirling in and blurring his eyes, looking out at his brother’s blurring ones. Then he shut his own. And when he opened them again, he could see Dima’s face so clearly. The stitches must have pulled, or the crusted blood must have softened from the flakes, because the snow that had settled in his brother’s beard had turned a watery red.
Dima watched the taillights go, small red spots in the gauzy air. On his cold face, the stitches burned. In his mouth, his pulse pounded at his gums. He could hear it in the hammering beneath the cotton where his lower front teeth used to be. No: the sound was too erratic, sharp. He listened through the pain, through the snowfall and the traffic, to a distant tapping like fingernails drumming glass.